“This year’s proposal takes one of the Young Architects Program’s essential requirements - providing a water feature for leisure and fun - and highlights water itself as a scarce resource,” said Pedro Gadanho, Curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design. “Relying on off-the-shelf components from agro-industrial origin, an exuberant mobile architecture celebrates water-purification processes and turns their intricate visualization into an unusual backdrop for the Warm Up sessions.”

According to the United Nations, by 2025 two thirds of the global population will live in countries that lack sufficient water; this statistic was COSMO’s main inspiration. Described as “an assemblage of ecosystems” made from customizable irrigation components, the installation is designed to be an easily replicable offline and online prototype that could potentially provide access to clean drinking water for millions.

In just four days, COSMO will be able to purify 3,000 gallons of water. Once the purifying process completes, the “stretched-out plastic mesh at the core of the construction will glow automatically,” providing a dynamic backdrop for the Warm Up summer music series. “It will gather people together in an environment as pleasant and climatically comfortable as a garden as visually textured as a mirrored disco ball,” says MoMA PS1.